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Recent troubles in the Labour party were likened by more than one unsuccessful letter-writer to the Daily Telegraph to those of the army described by Petronius Arbiter nearly 2,000 years ago:
We trained hard; but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.
That is not by Petronius, of course. It is a sort of urban thumbnail myth circulating with the help of the internet. Nigel Rees traces its main source to Up the Organisation by Robert Townsend (1970), but a smaller tributary takes us as far back as 1968, to another management book by David Willings.
There is a tide in popular quotation that washes up the same flotsam for a season, while old favourites sink or drift far out to sea. Remember Mrs Thatcher, on 4 May 1979, quoting St Francis at the instance of her speech writer Ronald Millar, ‘Where there is hatred …’. Here Nigel Rees comments, ‘There is some doubt as to whether St Francis had anything to do with the prayer.’ He is too cautious. There is no doubt whatsoever that Francis of Assisi did not write the prayer. He wrote little before his death in 1226, and this prayer, much reproduced on tea towels and bookmarks, first appeared in 1912 in a French religious magazine. Someone sent it to Pope Benedict XV in 1915 and it was published in L’Osservatore Romano, still anonymously. In 1920 a French Franciscan priest had it printed as ‘Prière pour la paix’ on the back of an image of St Francis.
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